Air Canada is the Latest Airline to End Service to JFK

T he last scheduled flights operated by Air Canada between Toronto and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York will be on Sunday, April 3, 2016, as Air Canada is the latest airline to end service to that airport.

Delta Air Lines planned to acquire the slots of United Airlines at John F. Kennedy International Airport in exchange for United Airlines acquiring slots from Delta Air Lines at Newark International Airport; and each transaction is subject to regulatory approval — but the Justice Department of the United States filed a lawsuit back in November of 2015 to block the transaction in an effort to preserve competition, according to this article written by Bart Jansen of USA TODAY. No timeline has been defined as to when the lawsuit will be addressed or settled.

Both Air Canada and United Airlines are members of Star Alliance.

According to this short article written by JL of Airline Route, “Currently this route is being served twice a day with a mix of CRJ200/705 and Dash8-Q400 by Air Canada Express.” An Embraer ERJ-170-200 SU aircraft is shown on a taxiway at John F. Kennedy International Airport in the photograph at the top of this article. In contrast — from Toronto and Montréal — Airbus A320 and Airbus A321 aircraft will be used daily by Air Canada on the routes to LaGuardia Airport.

At least 240 roundtrip flights per week between the two airports in New York and the hubs of Air Canada of Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver and Calgary are expected — but none to John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Summary

“JFK made sense when AC had the double feed of the UA p.s. flights and the connections from various international interlines, whether *A or not”, posted FlyerTalk member N1120A. “Once they lost the UA feed, I imagine it just wasn’t worth it. UA used to route a fair bit of award tickets over JFK to YYZ, which they would have paid AC for, so that alone is a factor.”

Whether the exodus of airlines which are members of Star Alliance will continue from John F. Kennedy International Airport remains to be seen.

7 thoughts on “Air Canada is the Latest Airline to End Service to JFK”

I wonder if this will be a trend of more star alliance airlines giving up their JFK slots and moving to EWR. BTW, from the article, at first I thought you meant DL and UA are both in star alliance (which is not true as you know).

““Currently this route is being served twice a day with a mix of CRJ200/705 and Dash8-Q400 by Air Canada Express.” One of those airplanes is shown on a taxiway at John F. Kennedy International Airport in the photograph at the top of this article.”

From a business perspective it makes sense. From a fliers perspective, flying to or connecting at EWR is worse than JFK. Fewer runways, the runway configuration, and the size of the airport all lead to increased delays and cancellations. Just something to think about.

If I remember correctly, Newark Airport has three runways — one of them was typically used for smaller aircraft…

…but then again, Newark Airport also had less traffic than the other two airports which serve New York City — despite that significant delays were certainly possible at Newark — where sitting on the taxiway for an hour is not unusual at peak times.

You bring up a very good point about perspectives, Captain Kirk. Imagine a world where both the business perspective and the customer perspective were balanced so that a win-win situation occurred. That happens with some companies; but those companies would be in a minority these days — especially with regard to airlines.